25.
The Velvet Underground & Nico (Verve, 1967):
This is the one that did it as far as the whole “art”
preoccupation which has become SO much a part of so-called
“rock” these days. Rock just means songs that
are played w/ bass, guitar, drums and vocals w/ maybe
a few exotic embellishments, so it ties in easily with
the loft scene where artists tend to dwell. Then again,
nowadays so does some hokey dude w/ a turntable playing
those wretched beats ad infinitum. But it wasn’t
always so—“rock” (or pop) music had
to move into the galleries, and it was on the wings of
this group. Not everyone liked ‘em at the time,
but isn’t that kind of the point? And the Velvets
were the first to realize this, which is why they are
still being mimicked so much today (e.g., Strokes). Warhol
was the reason why—if he’d never discovered
them they would’ve continued to starve on the Lower
East Side and ended up recording for ESP. If that had
happened, this record would’ve come out very different—but
we all know that didn’t happen. The banana got pealed,
and Warhol willingly licked his lips, but the American
public didn’t. So what? It wasn’t made for
them anyway—it was “art.” The Warhol
sealed proved it. Plus he bought them bigger amps. Their
punk tendencies dictated the way the music sounded—so
raw and fresh that it is still sounds resoundingly beautiful
today. Listen to the scraping chords of “I’m
Waiting for the Man” for the absolute most malicious
sounding warp of the whole Jimmy Reed guitar style, a
chopping rhythmic hammer that predated Stooge-thrash and
still sounded strangely jug-band ish in that whole sixties
early-days-of-drugs approach. They just took all those
folk and blues influences downtown and mixed it with their
fag art friends…but then you also have Reed’s
literary pretensions and Cale’s classical training.
And the Olatunji-influenced drummer. They were a weird
bunch, there’s no doubt about it. It was positively
a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence that cannot be repeated.
But it HAS been repeated 5 billion times, and keeps getting
repeated…which is of course the greatest testament
to its lasting brilliance. The clothes and the hair don’t
mean that much, not to mention the skinniness. The mean-spiritedness,
now that’s another thing entirely, and they had
that in spades, but not necessarily more than Sky or Roky
or the Chocolates…it’s just that they were
INTELLIGENT! The college rock thing also came into play
w/ the Velvets because, except for Moe, they were all
academy-bred and, y’ know, the Beatles or the Byrds
or the Grateful Dead couldn’t necessarily say that.
But of course the Talking Heads or Love Child could. And
so it went, and it’s all because of these War Baby
brats. That was the punk thing about them, and the birth
of Siouxsee Sioux and all that…the elitism and the
contempt. The Stones had already verged it, and there’s
no doubting the Stones influence on the Velvets (“There
She Goes Again” taken from the Out of Our Heads
arrangement of “Hitch Hike”), or the Dylan
influence on at least Lou either…but the Velvets
were their own thing entirely, and they were also musical
geniuses, particularly Cale, which is what made them so
much graver than Siouxsee Sioux. Songs about S&M in
’65 were truly bizarre. When you really think about,
there ain’t even many songs about it today. What
were they thinking? It was perverse the way they deliberately
tried to tweak the forces of authority w/ a blatant display
of decadence. But they took it a little too far—they
were FEARED and that kept even most members of the press
away until it was too late. Lester’s first feature
on ‘em was entitled “Dead Lies the Velvet
Underground” (May ’71) so that tells you something.
To their credit, bitterness never overtook their general
message, and in fact w/ the third and fourth albs, actual
transcendence was achieved. This album bristled with a
kind of satanic glee, mixed with the droning ballads that
typify an early morning drug haze mixed with post-cabaret
desultoriness. It’s a mixture that art-fags in any
major city to this day can relate to. But the great thing
about the Velvets—THE great thing—is that
musically every member of the group, at least until Doug
Yule—and that includes MacLise, Conrad, etc.—were
total punks who hated everything. Therefore as the sixties
utopia was brimming were these New Yorkers with malicious
intent thrown into the brew…this makes the Velvets
cultural heroes in my opinion. “Heroin” as
an I-hate-you statement is still unsurpassed. And musically
it’s titanic, unrepeatable, as is “The Black
Angel’s Death Song.” The only song in the
American musical idiom as distinctly of-its-own as that
one is Jennie Mae’s “Camel Toe,” which
also sounds like no song in the English language (including
“Black Angel’s Death Song”). Yup, they
were great, possibly the greatest, and if there’s
any album that’s the definition of “classic”
it’s this one. You’re NEVER gonna see a list—“straight”
or no—that doesn’t include this.

24.
Something Else -- Ornette Coleman (Contemporary,
1958): In truth, this hardly-ever-written-about
alb is the one where Ornette really came into his own.
Being his first as leader, there was naturally a little
bit of disheveledness as far as direction…altho’
he’s still trying to play like Bird (“Jayne”
for instance) he’s already all over the map as an
alto stylist, and one can tell a whole new style is being
born. Cherry and Higgins were already with him at this
point, and a lot of the later standards are presented
here for the first time: “The Blessing,” “The
Invisible” etc. There’s piano, not always
a winning formula for Ornette, played by the Bop stalwart
Walter Norris. Oddly enough, while the piano is never
disharmonious, it never sounds like Norris is riding the
same merry-go-round horse as these guys either—after
all, they’d all come up together and were genuinely
on a mission, just like the later Coltrane quartet or,
for that matter, the Velvets or Elevators. It was a gestalt,
measured by space-age leaps as opposed to giant steps…Norris
couldn’t be blamed for his dumbfoundedness and never
do we hear an outright gaffe. Mostly his playing is benign,
complimentary…even as Coleman and Cherry attempt
weird chord changes that almost sound like they’re
trying to trip him up. There’s a swinging west coast
feel to this album that absolutely epitomizes the era
right before the agents of Free-Jazz broke off entirely
with “tradition” (Ornette chief among ‘em).
Cherry’s still playing a conventional trumpet at
this point, heavily Miles-influenced, but he’s already
adding a few melodic variations that sound uniquely unfamiliar
at this point in jazz’s history. What I really like
about this album is you get to hear Ornette playing sax
as an expressive tool instead of as a weapon, like he
would sometimes later approach it. It’s not necessarily
better than the later Atlantic stuff (altho’ it’s
recorded slightly better) but Ornette’s playing
would never again be so spry and full of pure musical
outreach. Not that it was all down hill by any means,
but on this album he proves why, as a melodic sax player,
he was in many ways even better than Coltrane (a context
people don’t usually put him in, relegating him
exclusively to the “noise” sector, but nope,
folks, he was, in many ways, the last of the true Be Boppers…)

23. Impressions—John
Coltrane (Impulse, 1964): Everyone agrees that
Trane’s stint at the Village Vanguard in late ’61,
with Eric Dolphy in tow, was one of the all-time great
and most historic stands in jazz history. They even knew
it back then, which is why Impressions reprises
the material that didn’t make the cut on the original
Live at the Village Vanguard, released in ’61
and now, in retrospect, considered perhaps his greatest
album (see #11). Impressions falls in slightly
behind it, but that’s a minor distinction—how
the hell ‘re y’ ever gonna match “Chasin’
the Train” unless yr, say, Charlie Parker? The leftover
stuff is actually the best material on Impressions—this
constitutes the loose-reed excursion “India,”
later a Psychedelic Furs namesake, which completely numbfucked
this bulldyke that I worked with once in a cold storage
freezer in South Boston: “What the HELL are you
listening to?” She said. But as Tesco says, don’t
growl at me you diesel dyke! For all pre-Pharoah Sanders
loosening-of-the-valves textures listen to Dolphy’s
slow-and-methodical unfurling about 9 mins. into it, which,
a minute later, cues Coltrane on soprano doing harmonic
backflips that, to this day, Sonic Youth only dreams of.
I’m convinced also that the guy in Can did a lot
of listening to Elvin Jones’ drums on this one.
This is the best Coltrane in my eyes—the same loopy
and melodic texture he brought to the Don Cherry collaboration
The Avant-Garde, also released around this time
(and also no slouch). “Up ‘Gainst the Wall,”
which undoubtedly described the black struggle in America,
is a slow blues recorded sans Tyner, and it’s
quite perfunctory by Coltrane standards but then again
it hails from a whole different session than the live
tracks—mainly, the one for Coltrane (the
“blue” album) in ’62. But the title
cut, also from the Vanguard sessions and another variation
on “Chasin’ the Trane,” is one of the
band’s strongest workouts, with Dolphy and Coltrane
once again swapping complex algebraic patterns, as they
did all throughout the legendary stand, and the rhythm
section creating magnificent countermelodies for the soloists
to ride on top of. And ride they do, blazing a hot burning
poker thru the heart of Camelot. It’s a uniquely
cosmic moment…the fact they captured it not once,
not twice, but multiple times is testament we should all
be grateful for, even if the precedent it set has been
so utterly unmatchable that whole fuckin’ genre
has pretty much gone in the toilet ever since.

22. Ace of Spades—Motorhead
(Bronze, 1980): This was their magnum opus, but
their fate was already assured by this time—after
three absolutely sledgehammer albums, the greatest “power
trio” since Hendrix waxed an LP that defined speed-metal
aggression and punk fury at a time when those boundaries
were first being crossed. At first, the hordes of metal
were opposed to punk, and vice-versa, probably due to
the difference in hairstyles more than anything. But Lemmy,
a true journeyman who’d toiled through the whole
British scene and had always been on the wrong side of
everything—kicked out of HAWKWIND, how bad can it
get?—was NOT aghast at the breakneck fury o’
punk…to him it seemed like an inevitable conclusion.
Here was a guy who actually saw the Beatles at the Cavern
Club…he was THAT old, so he knew punk of a gutter
variety, going back to the rock’s goddam first decade…like
Frank Zappa circa “Bobby Brown,” he was NOT
in fear of a bunch of 20-yr old shaveheads w/ objects
stuck thru their earlobes and nostrils. Taking a swig
of Carlsberg, he took one look at them and said: “Oy,
you think THAT’S bad, listen to THIS…”
And then he gave them albs like Motorhead, Overkill,
Bomber and Ace of Spades. In three short
years, Motorhead had established a legacy to rival their
spiritual stateside brethren, the Ramones, but no-one
in America was listening…until this album. Lumped
in w/ the “new wave” of metal coming out of
England at the time (Saxon, Iron Maiden, etc.), Motorhead
was far less reliant on spittly neck-wank, concentrating
instead on an absolute juggernaut of whipping guitars,
freight train rhythms and of course Lemmy’s trademark
gruff vocals. Not quite punk, not quite metal…it
was, dare we say, a WHOLE NEW FORM OF MUSIC, and it helped
rock finally cross the barrier into SHEER AGGRESSION and
RAGE, making possible everything from Henry Rollins to
Metallica to Big Black to Nine Inch Nails. Making sheer
FORCE-as-idiom a reality was what it was all about, even
tho’ the great thing about Motorhead, unlike those
later losers, was that they didn’t lose the ROCK
N’ ROLL quotient either…Lemmy made sure of
that, because rock n’ roll in its orig. form was
his frickin’ BIRTHRIGHT (as epitomized by the “Born
to Lose/Live to Win” credo that he adhered to).
So guitarist Fast Eddie Clark always had that CHUCK BERRY
as well. And Lemmy as a lyricist was no slouch of course…has
any song ever put it better than “The Chase Is Better
Than the Catch”? That’s really what it’s
all about, and the “you know I’m born to lose/And
gambling’s for fools” part of “Ace of
Spades” is pretty sage as well. Not a joke band
by any definition, they are probably, as far as consistency
goes, one of the greatest groups to ever rock the gospel.
Vindicate ‘em, venerate ‘em…only the
Ramones and AC/DC can claim an equal arsenal. Taken together,
they were the three post-atomic Super Powers of the Super
Rock era (w/ apologies to the Dictators, of course, who
fell just short of nuclear due to their limited lifespan…six
more months and they woulda got it). One other thing about
Lemmy you gotta admire…he fucked around with every
drug, and form of liquor known to man, with relentless
abandon (which is how he did everything) but he never
touched the horse, which was probably his saving grace.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

21. Back From Samoa—the
Angry Samoans (Bad Trip, 1982): These beanbrains
got no respect. True, every shavehead worth his or her
salt knew about this alb and revered it (which wasn’t
entirely a given considering that the Samoans themselves
were NOT shaveheads)—but other than, surprisingly,
Chuck Eddy, NO reputable rock critic has ever put it near
the top o’ any list. They were left out of both
Steve Bloom’s American Hardcore as well
as Mark Spitz’s We Got the Neutron Bomb—they
were also left out of The End of Western Civilization
(volume one obviously, I don’t even count the metal
one save for Steve Tyler’s comment about Johansen,
which was relevant). Fact is, the Samoans weren’t
part of any scene—even less than the Minutemen,
they came from outside of the milieu, and never played
to that whole “econo”/indie thing, which in
my eyes always made them MORE punk but punk in an ultimately
American Hollywood way, like the Standells or Zappa (to
just explore two sides of the pole that their hybrid ultimately
encompassed). The brat sensibility in rock ultimately
went back to Cooper, and these guys were firm believers
in that kind of suburban callousness (as opposed to downtown
decadence). Older than Black Flag, they’d already
formed their chops before punk had even happened and it
was all the usual spuzzle: mainly, the garage-band-into-psych-into-metal
evolution which encompassed everything from the 13th Floor
Elevators to Sir Lord Baltimore to, yes, Cooper. The fact
Saunders and Turner were rock critics reinforced their
essentially brattiness—and people forget, but in
those days, being a rock critic was actually something
COOL! These guys got free records, and that’s why
they knew about all the weird variations that rock had
been wrought through in the seventies…which ultimately
made them better musicians, even if it meant their music
was just a “version” of rock, a complete cultist’s
eyeview. But since MOST contemporary “rock”
is just a cut-out version of a pre-existing form now,
they were actually trendsetters. They could’ve easily
retreated into a culty kind of perfunctory existence,
like the Plimsouls or someone, but they were made of MUCH
tougher stuff…Turner’s stuff in Creem
was classic slay-thy-father rock writing in the Meltzer
tradition. He was a tall kid too smart for his own good
and he took advantage of it. Once again, here’s
where the whole “version” of rock syndrome
comes in…Turner was so cocksure that he heard the
hammering riffs o’ the Kinks, Who, Sabbath, the
Stooges and the Coop, and Kiss and the Dolls and Dictators
and everything else, and more or less concluded that it
could be even heavier, NASTIER…and rely even MORE
on the eternal power chord. And then there was Saunders,
who came from Arkensas-by-way-of-Texas…he’d
slept in dorms where crawdaddys had crawled over his feet
in the night, as hippie jerks protested Vietnam outside
of his window when all he wanted was some poon. Another
wisecracking brain who knew his ultimate $800-a-week future
was assured, he too saw the creaky corpse of rock as an
odorous pile of decaying lard…therefore why not
have fun sending it up? But the thing that separated the
Samoans from their other joke-rock peers is that, even
while their lyrics were supposed to be funny (and in the
realms of the Hardy Har Hardcore their only REAL peers
were Tesco and the Meatman), they were NEVER less-than-serious
about their music. Did I say never? “Tuna Taco”?
“I’m a Pig”? OK, so there were a few
obvious throwaways, but once they evolved beyond Vom and
got rid of Meltzer their music was always well-formed,
conceptually and otherwise. Getting back to the hardcore
challenge…when Punk came along, Turner and Saunders
felt at home, but then HARDCORE came along and they could’ve
easily retreated in fear. They were not, after all, kids
with nothing to lose who were living in the Masque…but
they responded to the CHALLENGE of hardcore, as in daring
to embark on tours w/ bands like Seven Seconds and DOA,
even as their math degrees festered. They weren’t
all talk in other words. They took punk the right way,
which was to always piss EVERYBODY off…I won’t
go into the whole Rodney thing, except to say that they
were the ONLY ones in the LA scene who dared go against
that aging glam-hag at a time when he and that other shitrag
Foley practically ran the club scene in that town. It
costs them, but then again, they had the math degrees
to fall back on…who cares? They defied everything.
By the time this album came out, they were notorious,
and Back From Samoa became one of the pre-eminent
early-hardcore documents, along with Damaged,
Group Sex, Walk Among Us, Fresh
Fruit and We Are the Meatmen. The thing
that’s funny about it is, it isn’t really
hardcore…it’s beyond. EVERY song is about
something miserable, but these guys are like a swarm of
locusts—Todd Homer added another dimension of prickery,
so much so that, in his “Consumer Guide” review
Christgau shit his pants over him. But those of us in
the ‘burbs got the joke…Hitler, Sharon Tate,
kill you stab you, FUCK YOU…it was all funny now,
far from worrying about the malevolence of the age like
the hippies or even the punks, the Samoans were merely
LAUGHING about it all. And when three guitars at once
produced a resounding RK DK DK, with those amazing gnat-like
vocals by Mike and Todd, it was the most exciting rock
ever, so goddamn exaggerated in its snarl that it was
funny and incendiary at the same time. Did I mention it’s
also one of the fastest albums ever recorded? Breakneck
speed, which once again proved the shaveheads had nothing
over them. The whole album only runs about 15 mins. which
puts it on a par with that other all-time classic of LA
punk-hardcore, the Circle Jerk’s Group Sex.
The riff structure meanwhile is actually more Sabbathian
than Stoogean (I would make the same argument for the
Ramones, actually). Think of it this way—if the
Ramones are Sabbath on 45 than the Samoans are Sabbath
on 78. The evolution of late 20th century riffery in a
nutshell.

20. Are You Experienced?—Jimi
Hendrix Experience (Reprise, 1967): Has there
ever been a more auspicious debut record? I mean, for
totally expanding on the boundaries of what already existed.
Like the early albs o’ the Beatles, you really need
to get the Brit version of this album—and like the
Beatles, Mr. Hendrix was an artist who had everything
and I mean EVERYTHING as far as talent: great singing,
great songs, and of course a great band, a prototype that,
like the Velvet Underground, is still being die-cut and
applied to this very day…listen to the proto-funk
of “Stone Free,” the way the rhythms actually
fluctuate in a manner that’s a lot closer to sexual
or oceanic than the clomping plod of Cream, and then consider
not only P-Funk but Living Colour. Once again, this music
is still relevant and it’s too bad all the cutesy-girlie-ironic
crap has dulled some neophytes’ appreciation of
the more (or less?) rock-istic elements o’ Jimi
and his mates…the big Negroid daddy has never translated
to the indie kids, whether it’s Jimi or whether
it’s the Bad Brains…and, y’ know, the
truth is, they’re not that dissimilar. As for psychedelic
tomfoolery, Hendroid was obviously THE catalyst for the
space burble of Sly Stone, John McLaughlin, and of course
Eddie Hazel in Funkadelic. But what’s really miraculous
about Are You Experienced? is the way it combines
psychedelia with blues and soul. The seldom known “51st
Anniversary,” for instance (once again, get the
Brit album) is a kind of rubbery blues that swings with
rhythm the same way a good Mingus or Charlie Parker tune
does. Hendrix was in this category, there’s no doubt
about it…the hippie bullshit ultimately sunk him,
but even his most gullible psychedelic excesses (“The
Wind Cries Mary,” “May This Be Love”)
never sound forced…in fact it sounds naïve
and wonderful, a spark of sex and endless hedonism that
epitomizes the eye-opening vividness of the era (released
in the Summer of Love, this alb, along w/ Pepper,
is the penultimate sixties soundtrack). You can’t
forget about the band either…Redding is a melodic
master, who plays in a kind of rhythmic counter-step to
Hendrix, a throbbing mass that hits the chest and nervous
system with a ferocious fury. And Mitchell is a rhythmic
genius, a sacred combo of Keith Moon (for arms-flailing
fills) and Elvin Jones (for syncopated up-and-down motion).
Every member of the band totally attacks their instrument,
with the same kind of precision and rough abandon a later
trio, Motorhead, would. Need I mention Lemmy was their
roadie? Once again proving that the history of rock n’
roll is a straight line.

19. I’m Stranded—the
Saints (Sire, 1977): In the wake o’ the
Ramones, first the singles started coming (“Solitary
Confinement” by the Weirdos etc.). But I’m
Stranded was one of the first complete elpees to
adopt the nonstop buzzsaw formula…in fact, like
the Ramones, the Saints even included a coupla fifties
covers (“Wild About You,” “Kissin’
Cousins”). But the Saints had actually been around
as long as the Ramones in their native Aussie environs
and had been slowly honing their Stooges formula. It didn’t
take the Ramones to teach them how to play, but admittedly
the fast bracing stuff, and the simplicity, was reinforced
by the appearance o’ the first two Ramones albs.
The Sire seal gives it away—released around the
same time as such other Seymour Stein-sponsored classics
like Blank Generation and Talking Heads ’77,
this alb was amongst the front-line of definitive punk
texts. It’s one of the things that made us realize,
long before there was ever a Sex Pistols alb, that this
phenomenon was not a single-band crusade (thanx Ramones).
Guitarist Ed Keupper was among the most able-bodied of
the post-Williamson guitar slingers (a school that also
included Cheetah Chrome, the guy in the Weirdos, Ross
the Boss etc. etc.) and the searing leads were a touch
that the still-leadless Ramones could’ve used…of
course the fretboards would flay with even more fierce
abandon on the subsequent alb, Eternally Yours
(see #30, Issue 13…obviously I think these guys
are amongst the greatest ever). But then they’d
add horns. They were never straight Ramones…they
were also Australians, and the Continent’s most
worthy exports that weren’t prefabricated by Vanda
and Young. Goddamn, all the real grit of punk, what made
it really fuckin’ EXPLODE in the minds and hearts
of millions, can be summed up by the bridge in “One
Way Street” when Bailey, a GREAT fuckin’ singer,
sneers “if you don’t like it honey that’s
too bad.” It’s as good as the Ig-ster at his
best, and these guys were doin’ it strictly straight
out of the shoot. “Story of Love,” with its
metallic riff and declaration-of-independence lyrics,
is downright hypnotic in its simplistic forcefulness.
“Messin’ with the Kid,” a clanky-but-brilliant
“ballad” based partially on the Stones’
“Sway,” would evidence that they were already
looking ahead to the slow stuff on the second alb (along
w/ the Ramones and Motorhead they were the ONLY group
from punk’s first wave who dared still sport long
hair). It’s just a great fuckin’ album all
around…in fact, along w/ Bollocks and Ramones
Leave Home it is the DEFINITIVE sound-of-’77
LP. And that ain’t fuckin’ hay as we all know.
Just say OY!

18. Killer—Alice
Cooper (Warner Bros., 1971): Like Sony, the Bugs
Bunny Company has generated a lot of good noise—perhaps
unwittingly—over the years. Y’ already saw
Master of Reality by Sabbath make the cut, not
to mention Purp’s Machine Head. One thing
they were ahead on was the early days of METAL, and no
opus epitomized that coming-of-age better than Killer.
The kids just don’t know how controversial and incendiary
the Coop was back in those days…I mean, when we
were literally children, the Coop was FEARED by parents…my
folks let me go to the Portland Civic Center to see ZZ
Top or Jethro Tull but not Alice. And of course that just
made me love the man more, as did EVERYBODY who was on
the cutting edge of rock then, an edge that didn’t
encapsulate punk yet, since it simply didn’t exist,
but shunned the more genteel stirrings that were becoming
predominant on the radio at the time: America, Seals &
Crofts, James Taylor, disco. You know the culprits. The
Coop was BY FAR the closest thing to actual “punk”
that has EVER been a “hit” in America, at
least until Nirvana. And I’m sure the members of
Mudhoney or whatever would tell you that. Need evidence
of the Coop’s eternal import? Just think of it this
way…when Rotten auditioned for the Pistols it was
to the tune of “I’m Eighteen”…and
has ANY record that snotty, before or since, ever ascended
to Number Four on the hit parade (once again, save “Teen
Spirit”)? The Coop was the eternal bridge between
sixties 2-minute fuzz-splat (“Talk Talk,”
the Seeds, etc.) and heavy metal. By the time “Eighteen”
took off (197-fucking-1!) the Coop had already made three
albs—the first two, created when the band lived
in California and was under the impetus of ZAPPA, were
actually kind of spooky-creepy-HIPPIE-folkie (not altogether
a bad thing in those days, as I always try to convince
SMITTY). But the third alb, the one “Eighteen”
was culled from, entitled Love it to Death, begat
the band’s partnership w/ Canadian producer Bob
Ezrin, not to mention their stint in Detroit, a hard-partying
town that also encompassed—need I say?—Iggy,
the Five, the Nuge, Seger, Funkadelic etc. etc. Cooper
picked up some bad habits, mainly his habit of drinking
a case of Bud a day, which prompted outright MEGALOMANIA!
Consciously the Coop set out to create a psychodrama that
would shock, offend (and out-rock) everyone. Even more
than something like Who’s Next, Killer
was the first document to announce outright that the seventies
had arrived…the kids grasped it, and Cooper ascended
to his God-like status as the Exhibitionist Grand Master,
fake blood oozing down his 120-pound frame as he chopped
his own fuckin’ head off for all to see. Killer
was the alb that Cooper moved into the “spook”
realm more than the glam/drag one…leave it for David
Bowie, he musta thought, and thank heavens for that, because
it would only be a few more years before we had not only
Kiss but the Misfits…and Coop is really the essential
root of all subsequent spook-rock. Music-wise Ezrin had
brought out the best in the band itself and there are
“rock classics” aplenty on Killer,
most of them—“Under My Wheels,” “You
Drive Me Nervous,” the “Sweet Jane”
ripoff “Be My Lover”—at least partially
the product of the underrated Michael Bruce (guitar).
One thing that should be reaffirmed again and again about
the Coop is that, once he lost this band, just like Iggy
with the Stooges or Lou with the Velvets, he lost it all.
The fact that Killer was as well-orchestrated
in its own way as Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper
made it endlessly listenable throughout. But what really
solidified its value was the decidedly post-everything
mentality of a song like the title cut, where the Coop
sang in that brat voice—the missing link between
sixties sneerers like Sky Saxon and the razor sharp roll
of Rotten—lyrics like: “I came into this life/Looked
all around/I saw just what I liked/And took what I found.”
That’s on the same level as something like the Stooges’
“Dirt” or BOC’s “Stairway to the
Stars” in the no-longer-playing-nice category. The
synthesizer also came into play on the immortal 8-minute
creep-rock opus, “Halo of Flies” (where Coop
sneered “I’ve got the answers to all of your
questions/If you’ve got the money to pay me in gold”),
which is what I meant about this being an ornate, orchestrated
opus on the Beatles/Who level. Listen to the soupy instrumental
part of “Killer” for a perfect Doors/Beatles/Byrds-meets-Blue
Oyster Cult fanfare. Cooper was no garage-rock fool. He’d
DONE his time in that capacity, way back in Arizona in
’65, and like the MC5 these boyhood buds were joined
at the hip for almost a decade. That’s the kind
of solidarity that breeds an innate understanding of each
other’s musical gifts, and that came through in
the masterful playing on Killer, indisputably
their magnum opus. Informed equally by the Stones, Mad
magazine and Boris Karloff, Cooper was the harsh seventies
reality before most people were ready for it. But those
who WERE ready—in the form of the Pistols, Ramones,
Dictators etc.—would soon spring to action. We have
Alice to thank, so salute him please…the Coop rules!
(His golf forays, as well as every album he ever made
after ’73, excepted…)

17. Horses—Patti
Smith (Arista, 1975): Just as tempting to include
album number two, Radio Ethiopia, a more lung-heavy
stream o’ human spit, but this is the one that first
sent shock waves through the short-hairs of the international
crotchfesters with ball-squeezing relish. Coming straight
out of the rock literari, Patti had street-cred to spare
and since, when Horses was released, we were
still about six months prior to PUNK actually happening
(unless y’ count the first Dictators alb) she was
able to masquerade as an incredibly urban “singer/songwriter”
and the LP actually ascended to the top fourth of the
charts in the fall of ’75, just about the same time
another Jersey-ite, Bruce Springsteen, was gettin his
mug plastered on the cover of both Time and Newsweek.
Patti dug Bruce, Bruce dug Patti (as evidenced a couple
years later by the duet, “Because the Night”).
At that time they both came under the category of “new
urban realists,” but anyone who heard Horses
knew that a more subterranean element was at work here.
Cale’s production was the first tip-off…this
was the spawn o’ the VU comin’ home to roost,
and “Land,” on the second side, was the best
long song since “Sister Ray.” The skizzling
guit-boxes o’ lanky rock crit Lenny Kaye, the somber
pianistics o’ Sohl (already used to expert effect
on the groundbreaking “Piss Factory” single)
as well as Patti’s own phantasmagoric free-flights
was proof of two things: 1. They weren’t mere “rockers”
and…2. They weren’t just “punk”
dummies (ala the Ramones). Because of this, she got branded
as “art rock” in the first edition of the
Rolling Stone History of Rock but she was art
rock in the same way as the Velvets…the side of
“art” that openly embraced the more rough-hewn
aspects of rock n’ roll (and of course it’s
been that way ever since and yeah, SHE helped make it
happen). Faddishness was in evidence on the reggae knock-off,
“Redondo Beach,” and her wrangling of “Gloria”
was perhaps the ALL-TIME re-invention of an already-done-to-death
motif, as epic a transformation of a sixties war-horse
as Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” (or, for that
matter, her “Hey Joe”…in her eyes nothing
was sacred obviously). Her crusading efforts re: the Rock
itself shone like the sun, which is why, in the Mapplethorpe
cover shot where Patti was snappin’ her suspenders
before Siouxsee Sioux was out of her flares, she looks
like a warrioress getting ready to ride into town on a
rented horse to do gun battle with the flabby hide of
sheriff-elect Gilbert Doughty. Ride Sally, ride.

16. The Who Sings My Generation
(Decca, 1966): The importance o’ this alb—indeed
this band—can be summed up in two words: “high
energy.” That miser Noel Ventresco always balks
about my certification o’ this as their “best”
alb, but that’s only coz he can’t get past
the two James Brown covers (which are admittedly hokey-pokey).
Many would argue a more thought-out Townshend opus like
The Who Sell Out or Who’s Next
(or even Tommy) would be a more qualified choice,
but I’ve always said, in the case of any alb, it
all comes down to the quality of the cuts and for my money
Townshend never wrote a better batch than the ones on
this alb (“The Good’s Gone,” “Circles,”
“A Legal Matter,” “It’s Not True,”
“The Kids Are Alright” etc. etc.) and the
aplomb w/ which the whole band handles the material is
outright kinetic (as has often been said)—listen
to the jumping-off-the-bridge point of “The Good’s
Gone” for instance, right before the riff goes back
into its mechanical pre-psychedelic pattern. Or listen
to the slashing power chords in “It’s Not
True,” prior to the monstrous bridge. It was all
about dynamics, and this band had ‘em in spades
over just about everyone else other than the Beatles (Kinks
and Stones sound positively plodding compared to this
material). Like the early work of the Kinks, Yardbirds
and Pretty Things, in the sounds on this alb one can honestly
hear REAL ROCK being born…sure it’s still
Eddie Cochran and the Beach Boys, but there’s also
a bearing-down-on-the-instruments that more or less predated
EVERYBODY of any significance in the next, oh, I dunno…eight
billion years? Townshend’s use of feedback was perhaps
the most masterful of all, at least prior to Hendrix.
He used it as a voice, not merely as an intonation. The
feedback at the end of “My Generation” was
the most raucous example of the technique in rock prior
to “European Son.” Speakin’ o’
“My Generation,” Townshend was a great fuckin’
songwriter as well—listen to a song like “Much
Too Much” which set the pace for all his future
choir-boy antics (“Our Love Was/Is,” “I
Can’t Reach You” etc.) but also contained
rollicking honky-tonk piano, gargantuan guitars and lyrically,
a batch of metaphors to rival Lennon or Davies. Townshend
in his prime was the complete rock star, and he helped
define the prototype. The other boys were no slouches:
Daltrey is often maligned, mostly due to his height and
the buckskin more than anything else, but he was a passionate
singer and convincing front-man; Entwistle was by far
the rock-solid center of the action and his bass playing
was a rhythmic sheet-of-sound; and then there was the
man called Moon, who we can all pretty much agree was
the best fuckin’ drummer in the history of rock
n’ roll. And there it is, right there. What more
could you ask? Given their subsequent history, I’d
say they had a better run than most. File under: “The
founding fathers.”

15. Beggar’s Banquet—the
Rolling Stones (Decca, 1968): I know I said I
was gonna ix-nay these febes but when all is said and
done, gotta admit, as Brit rock scholar Roy Carr once
said: “Albs don’t come better than this.”
What we’re talking about here is a band totally
at the height of their powers (or some would say just
coming into them) with a rustic alb that reeks of a haphazard
nature and yet complete mastery…which is the Stones
paradox, at least for ’68 on, in a nutshell. This
alb was the turning point, not coincidentally because
it was the last one in which Brian Jones would have any
involvement. This is the alb where Mick and Keith finally
delivered the fatal blow, and they do little to mask the
references to mayhem, whether it’s the pseudo-devilboy
tomfoolery of “Sympathy for the Devil” or
the outright lechery of “Stray Cat Blues.”
The Stones are also master thieves (which befits the gatefold
of the boys engaging in bacchanalian self-indulgence as
if they really were a band of roguish highwaymen)—still
ripping off the blues on stuff like “Prodigal Son”
(which they mysteriously un-credited to Big John McDuff
and applied the all-purpose “public domain”
stamp onto, enabling them to arrangers’ royalties…they’d
perform a similar rape-job on the estate o’ Robert
Johnson a year later) they’d also found some new
post-modern resources like the Satans’ “Makin’
Deals” (“Sympathy”) and the Velvet Underground’s
“Heroin” (“Stray Cat…”).
Because, by then, they’d become such consummate
pros, second only to the Beatles, they made these rip-offs
distinctly their own. “Sympathy for the Devil,”
although it’s been done to death, is an absolutely
BRILLIANT construction combining many different voices
and instrumental motifs—piano, congas, guitars—to
compound the same eternal rhythm, which goes on for 6
minutes, intensifying with each minute, which is just
what truly GREAT music is supposed to do, and there’s
little denying that by the time the Stones got to Beggar’s
Banquet, they were pretty great. It’s probably
the only perfect alb they ever made, as in no true-blue
stinkers. Sure, you could probably do without the six-minute
“Jig Saw Puzzle” which, unlike the embryonic
“Sympathy,” stays kinda static…but with
Nicky Hopkins’ piano and Keith’s slide guitar
and Mick’s always-great vocals (when he still sang
instead of bellowed) it’s a pretty good kinda static.
Tunes like “Dear Doctor,” “Parachute
Woman,” “Prodigal Son” and “Factory
Girl” are so basic that they tend to come off as
throwaways, especially when surrounded by tracks like
“Street Fightin’ Man,” “Sympathy
for the Devil” and “Stray Cat Blues.”
But see if you don’t come back to ‘em…and
the whole alb for that matter, because, for all its decadence
and disheveledness, Beggar’s Banquet holds
together.

14. White Light/White Heat—the
Velvet Underground (Verve, 1967): For albums
being judged sheerly on the basis of intent this is probably
the all-time heavyweight punk champ, esp. when y’
consider when it was recorded, right in the midst of the
Summer of Love…did someone say “incongruous”?
These were the days when the standards of “rock”
were an un-ironic version of Britney in the form of the
Cowsills etc. (who just happened to record for the same
label, by the way). Needless to say, whereas now anyone
reasonably intelligent and relatively urbane EXPECTS skeleton-cracking
sounds and the “eeeh, fuck you etc.” attitude,
when the Velvets did it, it was truly NEW…but then
wasn’t everything in the sixties? The accompanying
alb was no mere monkey-sounds either…if any alb
can be described as a “screeching cabal” (as
many albs by now undoubtedly have) this one is it…from
start to finish, a searing ball of hate, masked in black
leather and heroin dust. These guys really were the velvet
underground, and they don’t try to hide it, which
is why the alb came emblazoned with a SKULL on it, and
on the back they REALLY look like the typical sixties
“creeps”…and the great thing is, the
sounds on the grooves back it up from start to finish:
the title cut is incredibly heavy punk rock for its time,
but nothing’s ever sounded quite like this since…Cale
as always is a big factor in the vibrating THROB of the
whole thing. In fact, this may be the Velvets alb w/ the
most Cale input, and that’s always a good thing.
“The Gift” is of course a monster riff, and
I’ve always preferred to phase out the vocal channel
and just enjoy the hammering guitars, which ripple with
sleaziness and all the cold winter mornings in unheated
apartments with instant coffee, made with tap water, cigarettes,
and talking to friends on the phone. Moe’s fantastic
on this one…all that Olatunji influence obviously
paid off. And there’s a section about 5 mins. in
when Lou is doing his equivalent on guitar of what jazzboys
like Archie Shepp were doing on sax. “Lady Godiva’s…”
is once again a Moe Tucker showpiece…the drum sounds
like a heartbeat, and the heart is dark and full of malice.
“Here She Comes Now” is complete drug-rock…their
most covered song—why shouldn’t it be? “I
Heard Her Call My Name” is unprecedented and sounds
spontaneous and unrepeatable (only Half Japanese would
try to fill those shoes and, surprisingly, did so quite
effectively with their version in 1995). Gotta wonder
what Lou was flying on the day they recorded the original.
“Sister Ray” is the steamroller riff of rock
that just seems to flatten everything else and goes on
for seventeen sadistic minutes. You get the idea…these
guys were NOT trying to be “cute,” “hip”
or anything else. They were, most of all, champions of
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION in the name of rock n’ roll
and we should all be grateful that they opened those doors.
As for their whole New York/punk/underground allure—which
was obviously the seed for Sonic Youth, et al.—White
Light/White Heat was the album where they really
nailed it down. It has lived in infamy ever since.

13. Charmed Life—Half
Japanese (50 Skadillion Watts, 1988): Along with
Game Theory, the best band o’ the eighties (w/ the
Samoans a close third). Funny coz I was just having an
argument with Chuck Eddy, who was reading Sonic Cool
on the toilet, and he was positing the opinion that Britney
Spears was better than the Misfits by dint o’ a
superior rhythm section…and there in a nutshell
we can see where the whole history of rock has gone wrong,
especially with people like him writing it! Which is the
reason a band like Half Japanese, who, in Charmed
Life came up with one of the purest distillations
of homespun American churn in decades, have basically
been excluded from the general consensus as if they DON’T
FUCKIN’ COUNT! But to me music has always been a
bunch of peckerwoods with instruments banging away…all
the other stuff needs to be de-contextualized to judge
it aptly, so what y’ hafta see this alb as is in
the tradition o’ Robert Johnson, Bob Wills, Hank
Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Ray Alvey & the Green
Fuzz, the Kegs, the Velvets, the Stooges, the Shaggs,
Kim Fowley and the Modern Lovers…in other words,
a purely American experience that spans a whole century.
True, on earlier outings, like the 3-record Half Gentleman,
Not Beasts, the band’s rank amateurism sometimes
sabotaged their highly-enlightened philosophical/musical
intent. While occasional excursions like “Acupuncture”
showed that they could be the honest heirs to the Velvets
if they really tried, they never quite got it down until
Don Fleming joined the band for this one LP and everything
apparently jelled. This is the all-time rustic-meets-punk-meets-comedy-meets-monster-movies-meets-wrestling
record…the only alb that sums up the cultural debris
of growing-up-in-the-seventies better is The Dictators
Go Girl Crazy and that’s practically the Bible
(w/ apologies to Lifeless). But while the ‘Tators
played tough guys, Half Jap were vulnerable sons-of-bitches…and
this is DEFINITELY the alb where Jad’s romantic
inclinations came to the fore, in songs like “Red
Dress” as well as “Madonna Nude.” This
trend would blossom more fully on the excellent follow-up
LP, Music to Strip By (which is also one of the
best albs ever made) on shimmering opuses like “Silver
and Katherine.” Of course that alb actually came
out before this one, because like the Velvets’ VU
and Big Star’s Third and other “lost”
classics, there were extraneous circumstances that prevented
this alb from EVER seein’ the light o’ during
the period when it was actually recorded (which would
be 1985). For the complete lowdown, rent the Half Jap
documentary, The Band That Would Be King. All
twists of fate aside, there’s little doubt this
alb was theoretically phrased with the same kind of sweeping
implications as Sgt. Pepper or Something/Anything?
or Who’s Next or Pet Sounds. In
other wds, the minute it left the box, the band KNEW it
was their magnum opus, a fact that’s hard to argue
with, given material like “Snakeline,” “Said
& Done,” “Poetic License,” “Trouble
in the Water,” “Day and Night,” “Roman
Candles” and all the other great songs that combine
a romantic sense of innocence with this weird swirling
living-room barrage of no-wave raggery…this alb
helps confirm my eternal theory that if the Beatles had
never happened there would’ve still been “rock,”
and GOOD rock, perhaps BETTER rock, at that. That includes
the Velvets, and Half Japanese are their ONLY logical
heirs (a fact more or less confirmed by Moe Tucker actually
JOINING the band for a brief spell in the late eighties).
A certified winner.

12. Two Steps From the Middle
Ages—Game Theory (Enigma, 1988): Scott
Miller is the greatest lyrical genius in rock (w/ Shernoff
as a close second). Check out the opening verse of “What
the Whole World Wants,” which really nails it: “We
think that it can work/But it doesn’t often/We think
we look like jerks/Nailing our own coffins/We think that
we can talk/But we miss it by a mile/We think that we
can joke/But no-one cracks a smile…” Perhaps
you had to be there, so you could witness the sneer with
which the mighty man delivers these morsels of wisdom…or
the grand swirling harmoniousness of the music…or
the glorious bridge that, Beatles-style, rips the song
right in half, as Miller stands with his hair eight feet
atop his head sneering once again: “Eeeeh, it must’ve
been yer little sister I saw…” There’s
also the fact the quizzling opening riff is pure Sonic
Youth…this WAS ’88 after all, and “college
music” encompassed a broad range. Don’t forget
there was Lolita Nation BEFORE there was Brylcreme
Nation…and that’s really the essence
o’ Miller (that is, how many GOOD parts there are
in a typical Scott Miller song): he’s the WHOLE
artist ala the Stones, Dylan, Beatles, Brian Wilson, Townshend,
Hendrix, and occasionally Neil Young, Lou Reed or Thunders
or Chilton or Rundgren…a song constructionist who
can sometimes complete the picture from A-to-Z in one
sitting. Take for instance the lilting “Amelia,”
which is the ultimate Miller…a crooning lament w/
just the most hypnotically lilting chords and counter-melodies.
Sweet female vocals adorn a quantum o’ these tracks
coz, y’ know, Miller likes to have the girls around.
All his songs are about girls, but this was the eighties
so he also has some cryptic poking-fun-at-the-culture
observations which all add up to heaping dose of “eeeeh.”
He’s not afraid to utilize self-deprecating humor,
like the great point in “You Drive” where
he unwittingly walks into a sports bar only to face scorn
from the locals: “Waaaaah, what’s that bah
wearing? A flowered shirt? WAAAAAAH!” It sums up
an awkward moment in the whole cultural clash that wouldn’t
be matched until the fatties in Abunai unsuspectingly
walked into Benny’s Pool Hall in Pawtucket, MA to
use the phone in the summer of 1998. Needless to say,
the locals weren’t impressed by Joe Turner’s
ponytail etc. Miller understood things like this WAY before
anyone else, including Stipe and Company (who he was friends
with thanx to the Mitch Easter connection). But the crucial
difference was, whereas all of Miller’s songs were
about women, all of REM’s songs were about…MEN!
So, y’ know, take that for what it’s worth.
Really there’s no way to over-inflate Miller’s
greatness…song after song of suite-like grandeur
adding up to confectionary completeness. This alb’ll
make you fat. Funny also how, on his eighties albs, Miller
actually employed the snap-drum. Like the Ramones, he
wasn’t some snooty anti-populist ala Sonic Youth…he
totally wanted to get this stuff on the radio, but UNLIKE
REM, on HIS terms…so while, thanks to the snappage,
this alb was “state-of-the-art” as far as
being eighties “radio-friendly,” the radio
of course never touched it. It was too “eeeh”
and Miller walked and looked around as if he just didn’t
care. But the 6-ft. redhead in the audience knew the words
to every song. And so it goes. “Throwing the Election,”
which employs Deep Purple organ for its apocalyptic intro,
is one of the utmost Miller creations, musically and lyrically.
He speaks in cryptic terms that would put Dylan to shame,
but unlike Dylan doesn’t come off as curmudgeonly
but as scintillatingly grandiose and omnisciently God-like.
Musically it’s a throbbing muscle of rhythmic perfection,
complete with dancing fandangos of lead guitars to accompany
the solid 1-2 punch of the completely in-synch stomp…all
signaling a love affair, the terms of which, to Miller,
epitomize the complete ascent and declension of man, of
time, of eternity itself. And all in three minutes. That’s
rock n’ roll Phil Spector-style and Miller’s
ABOUT the only one who’s EVER grasped it so completely.
This alb has everything from mid-sixties Who type guitar
wrangling (“Wish I Could Stand or Have”) to
table-setting sparkle-craft (“Leilani”) to
gossamer Big Star glaze (“Initiation Week”).
Any Miller alb would do, and if I wasn’t striving
for some objectivity here, a few more Game Theory albs
woulda made the cut…but Two Steps is about
as perfect an LP as yr ever gonna discover. Since it followed
the even MORE epic, 2-record Lolita Nation, the
band was obviously bestowed with divine powers. And that
power was the power of Scott Miller.

11. Live at the Village Vanguard—John
Coltrane (Impulse, 1961): In the fall of ’61,
John Coltrane began a legendary stint at the Village Vanguard.
Part of the hoopla was that Coltrane was previewing his
“new” music with the addition of the acclaimed
precocious young talent, Eric Dolphy, on alto. By “new”
music that meant a more experimental direction than his
Atlantic albums had evidenced and Coltrane, who’d
broken off from Miles for good approximately a year and
a half before these dates, had just signed with Impulse,
a label that was to become known for its experimentalism.
Dolphy had been a big influence on Trane, and vice-versa,
and Live at the Village Vanguard represents the
full blossoming of their spiritual unity. The opener,
“Spiritual,” for example, is one of the most
stirring duets in recorded history, a performance of such
stately power that one can hear the ages literally cinder
as it scales along its somber course. Dolphy’s alto
solo about 15 minutes into it is an epochal moment, when
the jazz world was loosening its cufflinks and putting
its elbows in piss. The moment hovered briefly, before
the walls fell down. Live at the Village Vanguard
captured that moment—it was the early days of Kennedy
when hope seemed alive, and that included jazz as well…nobody
was trying to fight this stuff yet. They’d get scared
away with Free Jazz and the ensuing Impulse/ESP
onslaught…and black power in general. But when this
alb came out, guys like Coltrane and his band were able
to twist a few knobs subtly without wreaking full-blown
havoc. Therefore the message was spread far and wide.
The recording of this album predated the forming of the
classic Quartet. Tyner was already on board w/ Roy Haynes
and Reginald Workman handling the rhythm section. Both
of them perform excellently, particularly on the marathon
“Chasin’ the Trane,” which is where
Coltrane really perfected his whole “sheets of sound”
approach and proved himself the master blaster on the
planet, which is a pinnacle he stayed at until his demise
in 1967. By the time he passed, it was deservedly to a
martyr’s requiem (as opuses like Ayler’s “For
John Coltrane” and Frank Lowe’s “In
Trane’s Name” attest). For all intents and
purposes, the legend started with this stint—and
album—and that goes for Dolphy as well, who’s
own tragic snuff-out early in life was almost as deafening
as Coltrane’s.

10. Oh Yeah—Charles
Mingus (Atlantic, 1962): From start to finish,
his best album. A barnyard full of raucous notes blend
with orchestral embellishments to create the ultimate
transitional album, not only for Mingus but for jazz in
general…because while this isn’t an outright
free excursion, the presence of Roland Kirk, with all
his honking apparatus, and the fact that Mingus, perhaps
the pre-eminent bass player in jazz, steps aside to concentrate
on piano on this album, leaving the stand-up duties to
Doug Watkins, shows that he was consciously testing his
audience’s expectations. And while Oh Yeah
is certifiably “experimental,” it’s
never any less (or more) than informal…which is
of course the great gift of any true musical genius (of
which Mingus is undoubtedly one of the 5-10-20 biggest
we’ve ever known)—that is, making the idiosyncratic
sound effortless and the divinely inspired seem like it
happened by accident. This was the era when Mingus surrounded
himself with an exotic array of handpicked talents like
Kirk, Jimmy Knepper and Booker Ervin to create his multi-layered
ensemble sound where it sometimes sounds like two soloists
are playing two uniquely different solos at once (see
“Hog Calling Blues”). Chaotic, in other words,
but the gospel undercurrents always keep the music moving
in a straight-ahead direction, so much so that old Charlie
has to outright whoop mid-song on several occasions and
“Ecclusiastics” even contains a rip-roarin’
hand-clappin’ call-and-response testimonial straight
outta the Baptist church on a Sunday morning when half
the congregation are hungover (particularly Mingus). On
other instances, he sings, such as “Eat that Chicken,”
an homage to Jelly Roll, or “Devil Woman,”
which is full-blown animal bark on an almost Beefheart
level. Don’t laugh—“Passions of a Man”
might really be the first example of true sixties psychedelia.
And “Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop the Atomic
Bomb on Me” is an intense jam featuring Mingus pleading
for his life to his maker, who obviously isn’t going
to look sideways at all the pimpin’ entailed in
Mingus’s mostly-bullshit auto-bio Beneath the
Underdog. It’s that kind of album…questions
of life and death, and good and evil, arise in every groove
of its bopping persistence. Which is why it makes the
Top Ten.

9. Ramones Leave Home
(Sire, 1977): These idiots. At this point, who
cares about ‘em? History would reveal ‘em
to be NOT quite as prescient as the Pistols, or almost
anyone else. Look, when the Ramones did it, they didn’t
know they were doing it. But they did it, and
they did it first. And while the first album was an auspicious
slab of black tar worthy of paving roads with, the second
album, with its complete whizomatic sleekness and ultra-bracing
jet-engine overdrive, was the epitome of the so-called
“buzzsaw” technique from whence all else sprang.
The ultimate seventies sound they wrestled with Nugent
and Kiss and Skyhooks and Starz and the Babys and the
Dictators and the Dead Boys and Kaptain fucking Kool and
the Kongs…it really was the age before all the grimness
would set in, and that’s the spirit they evoked,
even as they pointed towards the grimness. 14 songs, 20
minutes, it was like the Beatles again—they were
that good—but with a cynical twist, epitomized
by the opening verse on “Glad to See You Go”—“gonna
get the glory like Charles Manson”—which went
by so fast, and was delivered in such a mumble via Joey,
and was such an elemental part of an overall caterwaul
(via Johnny/Dee Dee…as history has proven didn’t
matter so much who the drummer was), that it hardly mattered
that here was a post-sixties generation making a folk
hero out of MANSON! And so it went…I’ll never
forget the sniffling review from the hippie hack at my
hometown paper, who fumed: “Mmmmnnn! Three of the
songs here are about murder, mmmnnnn,
two of them in the first person!” But despite
the righteous indignation of the hippies—which,
trust me, kidz, the Crumones faced a LOT of—they
could not forestall the coming don’t-care culture,
which Cooper had begun and these guys, and the Dictators,
helped propel to the next level making possible, oh, I
dunno…the Dickies, Weirdos, AntiSeen, Dangerhouse,
Slash, LA punk in general, Fear, the Queers, Sub Pop,
Mudhoney, Forced Exposure, Gerard Cosloy, etc.
etc. Mind you, we’re talking in a PHILOSOPHICAL
sense now…I won’t even mention musical except
to ask the question…ever heard of GBH? (Did I hear
someone say Motorhead? Oh yeah…they said
it! Once again…those idiots.)

8. A Different Kind of Tension—the
Buzzcocks (IRS, 1980): When I first bought (stole
actually) this alb in the summer o’ 1980 from DeOrsey’s
Record Store in Falmouth, Maine I didn’t realize
the quantum import of it, let alone this band. But the
subsequent mewlings of rock crits who had their heart
broken to the sound of “Why Can’t I Touch
It” eventually convinced me that these guys, in
their own way, were just as fundamental as the Ramones,
Pistols, J-Division and Wire in the annals o’ punk
prototypes. Well, lately, in the aftermath of almost continuous
romantic disillusionment, not to mention the total destruction
of my mind, I’ve been listenin’ to this speed-stoked
turkey and y’ know something, it’s obvious
now that these guys were a great deal more intelligent
than almost all their peers (esp. the Ramones). They had
a way w/ a tune too, just like Hoagy fuckin’ Carmichael.
In fact, in their own way they’re almost as adept
at it as Scotty Miller, altho’ in a whole different
vein of course. Coz what I really like about these dingdongs
is that, while they’re utterly “punk,”
they don’t succumb to anomie-for-its-own-sake, still
harboring romantic hopes on songs like “You Say
You Don’t Love Me,” a song that any greenhorn
can at some pt in his stupid lady-lusting life relate
to, not to mention the opener “Paradise” which
jettisons its message so briskly that y’ hardly
even fuckin’ notice it. This is also the alb where
Steve Diggle came into his own as a songwriter/singer
(altho’ he never did much after this but then again,
did anyone, and that includes Mr. “I’m a Homosexual
Too” Shelley?). But you gotta love a song like “Sittin’
Round the Home,” which is the story of my life,
articulated with absolutely AWESOME cross-movement which
shows these guys were kings of DYNAMICS in a manner that
makes the Pistols/Ramones sound absolutely STATIC and
yes once again foreshadows the great one Miller. Can’t
say enuff about “Say You Don’t Love Me”
either…good ol’ Shelley, as I noted in my
book, dared get ginchier than anyone else at the time
making possible that other Manchesterian Morrisey (whom
I don’t totally hate by the way, not being anti-ginch
just like I ain’t anti-butch). In this song, the
whole thing seems to be “I didn’t want it
anyway” and that of course is a lament that ANY
lustful fella has gone thru…and how can you not
luv a tune that so totally articulates REAL LIFE!? That’s
what makes music meaningful, as opposed to just an abstraction…and
this song is REAL. Almost as if to reinforce this fact,
the next song is Diggle’s amazing “You Know
You Can’t Help It,” which may be the greatest
song of ALL TIME…the equivalent of seeing Erin Hosier
naked underneath ermine furs or hearin’ Dagen McDowell
say in that sorghum sweet southern voice “ya laaahk
maah leather boots, Joe?” and realizing that, yeah,
you just can’t fuckin’ help it! Great fuckin’
bash-‘em up intro, a full-on steam train into the
future that jet-propelled everything into the post-everything
realm in two seconds…and such UTTER frankness about
sex! Let’s just say it really hits home. I can take
months off from the dope, but nope, can’t stop thinkin’
about those creamy honeypots, and the Buzzcocks were the
FIRST group, at least since the Stones, to come RIGHT
OUT and say that yeah, the sweet lick of luscious femme
flesh is the be-all-and-end-all…think of a world
w/ out puss n’ pud and aim for the nearest cliff
w/ yr John Deere tractor. This is what life means and
the ‘Cocks, true to their name cum right the fuck
out n’ proclaim “you know you can’t
help it!!!” Then again, how could a Little Richard
paraphrase ever fall short? (Kind of like when the Lazy
Cowgirls did a song called “I can’t Be Satisfied”
ala Muddy…) And as Iggy, another one who understood
the eternal pride o’ pud, said “and that ain’t
all”…songs like “Raison d’ etre”
and “Mad Mad Judy” are more-than-adequate
punkstomps perfect for their time or any other and I must
admit, “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Life,”
w/ its message of suburban aimlessness, and of course
the epic 7-minute alb closer, “I Believe,”
one of the first self-conscious punk attempts at longevity,
w/ its bleak-but-at-the-same reaffirming credo: “There
is no love in this world anymore,” were anthems
to me as a youth. Of course, Shelley was right…considering
this alb came right at the precipice before Reagan marched
in, and MTV went on the air, as well as the prevailing
callousness of the post-everything culture, “love”
was a strangulated misnomer. But sex, happily or unhappily,
goes on forever.

7. Highway to Hell—AC/DC
(Atlantic, 1979): Y’ know, there IS such
a thing as rock n’ roll (altho’ probably unbeknownst
to 50% of the readership of this or any other mag, webpage
whatever) and rock n’ roll, at its core, is much
closer to Beavis and Butt-head than it is, say, Japanese
anime. Not to slight the fine readers o’
this mag…it’s just that almost ANYONE who
seems to have an intellectual preoccupation w/ this shit—that
is, enuff to read about it anyway—has a
certain shyness nee reservation concerning the
more thud-oriented manifestations o’ the art…but
what they’re missing is, rock n’ roll in its
early days was specifically almost ALL thud…’n
stud or even faux stud, which is definitely
what THESE bozos were/are, but they didn’t care,
and you shouldn’t either…fact is, from the
openin’ notes o’ the epic title cut, the ALL-TIME
best Satan rock opus EVER, precisely coz it’s so
goddamn funny (“my friends are gonna be there too”…GREAT
line!), to the last skeezin’ skidmark o’ “Night
Prowler” (a BLUES for chrissakes) this alb is testament
to a thoroughly TOGETHER modus operandi. Better
than Zeppelin, even better than Sabbath…dare I say
Motorhead? And it took a bunch o’ Aussies to pull
it off. With two Saints albs in the Top 40 and this ‘un
in the Top Ten y’ gotta scratch yr peanut n’
wonder what is it ‘bout those Aussies that makes
‘em such swifties in these pure-rock stakes? Maybe
it’s all that Foster’s! And speakin’
o’ brew, of course lead larynx-scraper Bon Scott
DIED from an OD o’ the booze just as this alb was
getting ready to move these clowns outta the B-leagues
amongst the ranks of America’s hard-rock hordes…who
WERE muttonheads after all, which is partially the reason
punk fans have never forgiven this kind o’ music…it’s
the fuggin’ FANS who’ re to blame, and I can
relate to that, coz back in the day, I didn’t wanna
know anything ‘bout this kind o’ muzak (i.e.,
heavy mental) either and even to this day my football
buddies like Smitboy and Points guitarist Andrew Colston
don’t wanna know yadda about the more baroque forms
o’ guitar gunner-dom…but at a certain pt,
I guess, I dropped such parochial biases and threw up
my fuckin’ hands n’ said “you know I
just love rock n’ roll so much that I’m just
gonna SUCCUMB to its almighty idiocy”…and
honestly, listenin’ to this immortal piece o’
wax now, I can only say “how the fuck can you resist?”
AC/DC also deserve credit for being the absolute MASTERS
of the intro…check out “Walk All Over You”
for sustained drama (and the title cut is no slouch).
No way around it, these guys knew how to breed EXCITEMENT
and isn’t that what it’s all about? Sure they’re
dumb, but it’s like when I watch Beavis
I can admit half the time that these guys ‘re REAL
stoopid but then there’s that side o’ me that
sez “yeah, these idiots are RIGHT, that truly does
suck.” Getting down to the basest crassest but most
celebratory (and gloriously oblivious) level is what it’s
all about, and few bands ever did so as unabashedly as
these guys…and comin’ from Aussie-land I honestly
think they were just isolated enuff to have it NOT be
a pose like even the fuckin’ RAMONES partially were.
That is, I really think these guys WERE that stoopid,
but like w/ Beavis, in a certain sense, in their obliviousness
was their eternal WISDOM…and they really meant
it. How else could Scott die in an upright position in
an automobile sleepin’ off a good night’s
drunk (and we mean REAL good, like John Bonham good…).
If you can just put aside yer prejudices for a minute,
y’ gotta admit, song after song on this alb are
true CLASSICS of, yeah, what else can you call it? ROCK
N’ ROLL (WAY more than those foppish feebs Led Zep
ever rendered): “Girls Got Rhythm,” “Touch
Too Much,” “Shot Down in Flames” and
the immortal “If You Want Blood.” Lyrics ain’t
bad either and these guys knew a thing or two about dynamics,
which, if you’ve read this far, y’ know is
my prime criterion…anyone can JAM and holler over
it, which is what Zep did half the time…but it takes
some basic understanding of, y’ know, LIFE, to be
able to render things that have both forward and backward
flux…like, y’ know, good cooking or good sex
(‘n these dynamics still live…I recently heard
a great new Lp by a band called the Pattern and the dynamics,
whether they know it or not, come directly from THIS alb,
it’s THAT ingrained into rock’s overall sonic
membrane). Which is just what these bozos meant when they
said “if you want blood, you got it” and y’
can’t say they didn’t give it up, and somewhat
righteously at that. Did someone say “anthemic”?
Isn’t that kind of what they invented? These guys
are WAY more important than the Ramones overall. And this
was the last LP before Scott croaked and that clown Johnston
took over. But even he wasn’t bad on Back in
Black and the underrated For Those About to Rock,
but this was AC/DC’s magnum opus. Don’t deny
yourself one more minute. You know you like it raw so
guzzle the gravy and get yer fuckin’ knees dirty
you slutty bitch.

6. Mothership Connection—Parliament
(Casablanca, 1975): The greatest R&B album
ever made, and the most ingenious conceptually, even beating
out stuff like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’
On…coz while Marvin expressed urban blight,
Clinton just made fun of everything on the level of whitey
but even BETTER coz he made FUN of whitey…explicitly
and relentless as he conceived a black planet that the
average honkmeister would be in FEAR of (which is what
future hip hop mongers like Chuck D n’ Ice Cube
sussed so intuitively). It all started with this alb’s
predecessor Chocolate City, itself no slouch,
but on Mothership the formula gelled to the nth
degree and the results are the ultimate cross-pollination
of earthy downhome fulfillingness and galaxy-bound cosmic
slop. Clinton was always a mother, starting w/ his Temptations-style
vocal-group stuff in the sixties (Ventresco owns a swell
bootleg of all that stuff that y’ used to see around
a lot but hardly ever see anymore) but a lot o’
the early Funkadelic albs were marred by aimless jams.
By the time he re-evoked Parliament in the mid-seventies,
combining horns and more dance-friendly rhythms in a definite
JB-influenced direction, he had perfected one of the truly
original seventies sounds…and never did it come
together so well as on Mothership Connection.
Perhaps the most rock-influenced of all the important
R&B men, Clinton did the grandiose palefaces of the
art-rock era one better by creating perhaps the ULTIMATE
“concept” album. Only Zappa ever masterminded
a more acute blend o’ social commentary and satire
with such seamless results and, let’s face it, he
was never even close to being “funky.” George
is the unconstipated Zappa and Mothership Connection
is the ultimate post-Watergate plunge. As for JB, let’s
face it, like the Ramones, he had no clue what he was
doing anyway, and he never made good albs, unless y’
count compilations (and if we were countin’ comps
Funky People Vol. 1 would be in the top five
albs ever made). So turn this mother out…and be
glad you don’t live in Atlanta.

5. Minor Threat (Dischord,
1980): OK, everyone knows they were chumps for
that whole “no sex no drugs no booze” edict…one
of the WORST doctrines to ever befall rock, and inherently
anti-rock by its very nature…and me suspects it
had to do more w/ the fact that they were too young
to drink, too lame to score dope, and too goddamn
fuggin’ UGLY to get laid than any moral principle
at work here (it was adolescent-derived SOUR GRAPES in
other words). But the fact is, whatever it was that made
‘em pull off perhaps the ULTIMATE to-the-brink,
intense, streamlined distillation of rock in theory/practice
EVER (sez so right on pg. 372 o’ Sonic Cool)
it was WORTH IT! What do I care if they want to fucking
make themselves miserable? Hell, the miserableness HELPED,
obviously. Wouldn’t YOU be pissed if you couldn’t
fuck or drink or smoke a joint once and a while? And these
guys were PISSED, but, once again, they cultivated it
into a raging juggernaut that wasn’t just a blur
of noise but perhaps the FINAL straw of Chuck Berry rock
n’ roll EVER…everything after this alb is
post- …umm, everything. In the annals of anger-as-an-effective-form-of-COMMUNICATION
these guys articulated their message like pros. And they
never stuck around long enough to muddle up the waters
although all subsequent offshoots—from Dag Nasty
to Fugazi—of course have had their pluses and minuses.
Didn’t matter…punk was a revolution because
it was decidedly UNLIKE anything that had ever come before,
and this alb was evidence of that complete detonation-of-all-previous
mindsets (if not idioms, because, as noted, it WAS still
rock). Aw well, fuck ‘em…I never
even smoked a joint myself til I was seventeen (nor wet
the noodle til two years after that, blush).

4. Lolita Nation—Game
Theory (Enigma, 1987): Before there was Bryllcream
Nation there was Lolita Nation. A double-album
as durable as dust, what can I say? Given Mr. Miller’s
unstoppable output over the past twenty years there were
many other worthy candidates from his canon that were
suitable for enshrinement: The Big Shot Chronicles,
Real Nighttime, Two Steps From the Middle
Ages (see #12). But since Lolita Nation
is a double album, and a concept album at that,
and it’s a concept album about CHICKS (what else?),
which means just more more more more MORE of what Miller
does best, which is gettin’ ginchy, then how can
you resist? Thing is, with most artists you don’t
WANT a double album, it’s just too much…but
since Miller is rock’s greatest artist ever, and
its ONLY true living “genius,” one can never
get enough. And arguably Lolita Nation was the
opus where he really hit his stride. There are so many
gems on this LP that if it were a jewelry store it would
be target for punx wearin’ ski masks. In the midst
of it all there are also samples from previous albs like
Real Nighttime, which, besides exemplifying Miller’s
eternal self-referential nature (doesn’t want you
to FORGET he’s the world’s greatest songwriter
after all), also shows how far in front he was in THAT
regard as well (SPEAKIN’ of punx wearin’ ski
masks). In fact, Miller always likes to pack his albs
chockfull o’ dissonance, but only betwixt cuts,
which is better than putting it in the MIDDLE of the songs
(like the idiots who made Bryllcream Nation).
Because one thing Miller knows more than just about anyone
of his musical generation is that a SONG has to hold up
and be, umm, y’ know, memorable. The ways
to achieve this are many, and only the true greats—Spector,
the Beatles, Stones, Brian Wilson, even twerps like Chilton
or Rundgren at their best (but definitely NOT the Ramones)—can
master the multi-fold art of songcraft that makes every
curvature of every song the kind of thing you want to
slide yr hands all over. Cultural references abound—such
as the heavy Star Trek bend of “One More
for Saint Michael”—but unlike peers such as
the Dead Milk-kids and Camper Van Wanktoven, in Miller’s
hands such things are never the Be All and End All, just
another clever embellishment that makes this NOT the Beatles,
Beach Boys etc. (i.e., he has to constantly remind you
that he knows that it’s the eighties and he’s
not just trying to reiterate the sixties with all the
lilting melodies). Like check out the opening cadence
o’ “Chardonnay,” a great song if ever
there was one, where Miller croons ala Thunders on Hurt
Me—more interesting melodic variations happen
in FIVE SECONDS of this song than in most bands’/artist’s
whole careers. In fact, it’s fuckin’ brilliant
how the alb winds down, with the triple whammy presented
on the fourth side, “Chardonnay” leading into
the organ-heavy “Last Day We’re Young”
(Miller, during his eighties phase was never opposed to
evoking the mighty whap o’ the snap drums), containing
the great line (which once again contains at least three
or four brilliantly seductive melodic “hooks”
within this one verse alone) “I think too much/I
always do.” That coulda been his motto. And in case
y’ missed the point, check out the lilting dirge
o’ “Together Now, Very Minor,” which
ends with Miller crooning “take it away/All away”
to a folk-strummed ode that once again contains eight
billion melodic variations (check out the way he phrases
the line “please don’t pay attention to/The
things I do or say”…the voice, the melodies,
the guitars…this guy is a fuckin’ GENIUS,
there is NO DOUBT! A modern Beethoven…but better
of course coz rock beats the fuck outta classical HANDS
DOWN, jerky boy). And with Miller, you get the feeling
that most of this stuff is autobiographical…which
means he’s the last o’ the true romantics,
and I mean REALLY romantic w/ out being schlocky. And
THAT, my friends, is truly a lost art as well as something
I can identify with totally. Keeping that in mind, lemme
reiterate my fave incident involvin’ this alb. Well,
let’s just say that I have had a cassette of Lolita
Nation for about a year now (have the alb, but can’t
stand the format of havin’ to always flip the fucker
when I get on a writing jag so I taped it…a CD of
this opus, which has long been outta print, will run you
the price of a small mortgage on e-gay) and last March,
when Tammy went to Florida, I was house-sitting her log
cabin in Wells, which I thought was gonna be like this
cool writer’s getaway where I could go on owl watches
in the woods behind her house during the time I wasn’t
writin’ the Great American Novel etc. etc. But takin’
care of that fuckin’ husky of hers consumed most
of my time, not to mention the fact we had a raging blizzard
in the middle of the whole thing, which cut the power
out, and also helped cut the power on the fuckin’
relationship, coz y’ know how when you have to be
in someone else’s shoes for several days, and assume
their lifestyle that you, in essence, BECOME them? And
in this case, after doing so, I was fully convinced that
her lifestyle SUCKED…but before any of that happened—the
storm, or the full realization of how much I hated that
dog—I was drivin’ home after droppin’
her off at the Manchester airport on the first day of
the “vacation” (using HER car, mind you, I
don’t own one) and listenin’ to my tape of
Lolita Nation again and again, and as I was rolling
through the Lisa Carverian terrain of Dover, New Hampshire,
which reminded me of ERIN HOSIER, since that’s where
I met her, “Nothing New” came on, and I dunno,
it was just one of those moments, which admittedly I have
a LOT of, where, y’ know, the void just fuckin’
opens up and life’s essential meaning flashes before
your eyes—and to me these moments always have to
do with music. So I’m driving and I’m thinking
of the diamond-eyed Princess and there’s Miller
singing: “And girl we know it's nothing new/To find
someone in love with you/And if you are so inclined/To
change you mind/A thousand times then do/And I will wait
for you/Nothing new.” But that wasn’t all—two
weeks later, after months of letters, I met Lauri and
Allison for the first time. And the ages burned. Somehow
I think Miller would understand.

3. The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!
(Epic, 1975): Here ‘tis kiddies, the
alb that REALLY broke it all open for this here bloke.
If it weren’t for “I Got You, Babe”
and “California Sun” (I’ve always had
a problem w/ covers, I think it’s a lazy man’s
way out, starting w/ the two JB covers on the first Who
album, unless of course it constitutes a COMPLETE transformation
ala the Fleshtones doin’ JL Hooker’s “Burnin’
Hell” or if it’s just so goddamn COOL in a
philosophical sense that it DEMANDS to be done, like Scott
Miller coverin’ Chilton’s “You Can’t
Have Me” almost note-for-note…utterly apropos
of course) it’d be number one. And in the case of
“California Sun,” they at least beat the Ramones
to the punch. There’s no comparison of course between
the two bands…the only thing the Ramones added was
a few cranks o’ meth…but Adny Shernoff was
obviously a true musical “genius” w/ melodic
and lyrical gifts that far surpassed the Rama boys…or
ANYONE for that matter, at least until the arrival of
Scott O’Miller. Meanwhile, for great billowing chunks
o’ metallic upsurge, Ross the Boss was—or
shoulda been—EVERYONE’S idea of a guitar hero.
For post-Townshend, post-Williamson ROCK ACTION, these
guys were absolutely the heavy weight champs, the ultimate
transitional band between metal (BOC, Stooges) and punk
(Ramones, Dead Boys). They’re also the most underrated
band EVER (save perhaps, who else? Game Theory…)
A classic case of too much, too soon, what can you say?
When they arrived smack dab in the middle of the mid-seventies
malaise, it’s a simple fact, NO-ONE was ready for,
as Dave Marsh fumed at the time: “Mmmnnnn!
Rock songs about WRESTLING and contempt!”
At least until Sonic Cool (see pg. 331), NO history-of-rock
book has EVER validated ‘em. True their prankerish
approach was partly Meltzer-spawned…these boys had
no fear of putting the scallop in the coffee machine at
work and seeing the bitter look on the old fart’s
face, not to mention freezing pigeons stillborn in jello
or mailing people garbage. But don’t forget the
Velvets ran around w/ SHIT in their barehands…this
is the stuff I’m always trying to explain to Lauri,
but it may be too late…ONLY Lisa Carver in the post-modern
era has EVER really grasped the outright IDIOCY of this
kind of just-letting-go not-being-afraid-to-look-stupid
abandon…but the thing is, and this is the fact I’ve
tried to stress ALL THROUGH THIS SURVEY, is that, there
was a time when this IDIOCY was the whole essence
du rock—remember Daltrey drowning himself in
baked beans? There was a time when it wasn’t all
about being “cool,” it was about FREEDOM,
and I dunno, kids, that era to me more and more seems
to have occurred in the seventies and seventies only…and,
as I said, the ‘Tators arrived right in the midst
of it all, straddling the line between super-rock “acceptance”
(they hoped…they were signed to CBS after all, one
of Clive’s last signings before he split for the
more genteel waters of Arista and Patti Smith/Lou Reed…as
VENTRESCO has suggested, the song about SUPERMAN might’ve
been the last straw…I can hear Clive, who quite
fancied IGGY dancing around in a g-string, now: “JLEEEEEEEEEEEEESTHLUSSSS!”)
and punk notoriety. Girl Crazy has all the makings
o’ the next-step in hard-rock after Cooper, BOC
etc. which is no doubt the way Adny and the boys intended
it…but they got clamped down upon by an increasingly
old-lady-like industry. Damn hippies. But the ‘Tators
were surely prescient, weren’t they? The whole wrestling-rock
thing has belatedly been aped by everyone from Half Japanese
to Cyndi Lauper to AntiSeen to NRBQ. The gloriously overblown
“super rock” stylings lived on in the form
of everything from the Meatmen to the Angry Samoans to
the Upper Crust. And the sentiment was dead-on then, dead-on
now, right from the very first blow: “I used to
shiver in the wings/But then I was young/I used to shiver
in the wings/Until I found my own tongue.” And it
just gets better from there, like in the case of Miller—who’s
the ONLY one to EVER match Shernoff in the verbal stakes—EVERY
lyric a fuckin’ trueblue keeper. An oft-misunderstood
factoid ‘bout this alb at the time was that the
mighty MANITOBA wasn’t even officially “in”
the group yet…even tho’ his ugly mug—and
bloated frame—appears on the cover he was merely
the group’s “mascot” (and personal cook).
But he’s there in “spirit” alright,
as well as a few well-placed bellows and wrestling-style
expositions (chiefly the immortal intro to “Two
Tub Man”: “I just got back from Minneapolis”
etc.). Oh yeah, I guess he also SINGS “Two Tub Man,”
and it’s a performance so akin to a squirtgun full
of piss that they immediately had to make him a full-fledged
member shortly thereafter (it was either that or the stomping
he gave Bangs). Another thing the ‘Tators brought
to rock was a purely joyous American experience that celebrated
things like FOOD, which would’ve once again been
totally uncool to the withered frames o’ the Eagles
etc. These guys awoke at noon for a whole day of completely
enthralling teenage hijinx… “cruisin’
in my daddy’s car,” stoppin’ at the
burger stand, pullin’ pranks, playin’ baseball,
smokin’ dope, droppin’ ‘ludes, makin’
out, beatin’ off, goin’ to the beach, goin’
to the mall, and the movies…and OF COURSE listening
to rock n’ roll, reading—and WRITING FOR—rock
magazines, and watchin’ WRESTLING! Not one iota
of a concern for the geo-political framework blah blah
blah, nor economic fears…I swear to you, kids, all
that stuff came on AFTER Reagan…was only one-kid-in-a-million
pre-1980 who EVER gave a fuckin’ WHIT about people’s
FEELINGS—that means CRIPPLES, ethnics, old ladies—nor
thought remotely about their “futures”…as
the Dictators said, so mightily, to riffs that would rock
the world forever: “We’ve reached the higher
spiritual plane/That is so high I can’t explain.”
As they also said, even in the height of the mideast oil
embargo: “Gasoline shortage won’t stop me
now.” What, me worry? It was TRUE rock, a wild kind
of abandon that I, like a lot of people, thought would
go on FOREVER…fuckin’ shit was I wrong! And
that’s been the cause of my eternal sorrow, and
anomie, ever since. Can you imagine what it was like to
hear this stuff when you actually WERE a teenager?! Thank
God for that trip to the mall, in the fall of ’79,
courtesy of Gilbert Doughty’s mom, where I bought
the one and ONLY copy of this alb to EVER appear in Maine.
She also chaperoned us to a RAMONES gig at a redneck bar
in Portland in the summer o’ ’78—one
of Marky’s first gigs I would imagine. Georgia,
we hardly knew ye!

2. Never Mind the Bollocks,
Here’s the Sex Pistols (Warner Bros., 1977):
What’s your favorite Sex Pistols song? “Hot
Cars”? No, that was Roky’s. Lately when I
think Sex Pistols, for some reason, I think their version
o’ “Steppin’ Stone” (on which
they totally outstripped either Thunders or the Monkees)
w/ Steve Jones, who was always a motherfucker, REALLY
bearing down on the RK-DK-DK chords while Johnny R. spits
out venom, esp. in the verse “you’re tryin’
to make yer mark in so-ci-et-AY-ya!” In his mouthings,
the wds finally MEANT something, which once again, was
head-splitting HATE (“tenfold” as Tesco would
say). So howcum it wasn’t on the first (and only)
alb? Answer: coz the boys knew this had to be the BIG
STATEMENT, hence no covers allowed. Coz what rested on
this LP? No fucking less than the subsequent later half
of rock history (the goddamn “New Testament,”
writ large). Y’ know when I was a kid I usta get
perturbed at that old scarf-wearing shit-sucker Greil
Marcus (whose scarves were admittedly the best since Return
to Forever) for proclaimin’ the Pistols essentially
better than the Ramones…after all, the
‘mones were YANKS n’ their whole Mowgli boy-of-the-jungle
routine appealed to my own mung-headed adolescent slobbiness
(as opposed to the Pistols’ clotheshorse virtues).
But now I realize years later I was wrong wrong wrong…the
Pistols are/were MUCH more important, and better too.
And despite the greatness of all the singles and B-sides
that led up to this alb, which of course raised the stakes
month-by-month so that when the alb finally materialized
it was w/ BAITED BREATH that everyone approached it (that
McLaren, clotheswhore or no, was no dummy), not to mention
all the posthumous stuff, this alb is really all you need.
Which, in a nutshell, is what makes the Sex Pistols probably
the coolest group ever…they only made ONE ALBUM,
but EVERY SONG is a keeper, an absolute MASTERPIECE. No
covers, once again, always a copout. Above all, they totally
ANSWERED the call, lived up to the hype and all that.
Trust me, even the crits who grinned through their moustaches
sayin’ how much they dug “God Save the Queen”
coz it reminded ‘em of that good ol’ Berkeley
tribunal spirit, were secretly hopin’ they’d
fail. Let’s face it, they were arrogant little shits
and anyone over the age o’ 20—which was older
than anyone in the GROUP at the time—held certain
reservations about their innate nastiness (a nastiness
that the nice-guy Ramones didn’t have…Dictators
meanwhile were on such a profound level they didn’t
even COUNT). But to a kid who was thirteen, which is the
age I was when this album came out, it was the absolute
turning point of my life…just hearing this kind
of vitriol expressed for the first time…well, let’s
just say, while I dug the Nuge and Kiss, like Hendrix’s
theoretical dismissal of surf muzak in lite o’ psych,
they would NEVER sound the same again. Who the fuck knows
who played the instruments? Obviously that dipshit Sid
didn’t pluck a note. As legend has it, they brought
Matlock back, and, if so, he performed admirably. Jones
and Cook, an interlocked tandem of grudge-fucking rhythm
who were essentially locked at the hip ala the Asheton
brothers (the obvious prototype), were of course the Godhead.
And need I mention Mr. R? Let’s just say, all the
subsequent insanity like Keith Morris’s ad-libbed
upchuck in the midst o’ stuff like Black Flag’s
“I’ve Had It” and “Nervous Breakdown”
was a DIRECT result of Rotten’s uninhibited snarl.
The razor rolls of the tongue—“RRRRRRRRRRIGHT
now”—were like little paraffin wafers mailed
to yr Sunday school teacher. Once again, Ramones concocted
the made-e-z-for-dummies formula but PUNK as a statement-of-purpose—and
this extends to everyone from Stiff Little Fingers to
the Dead Kennedys—BEGINS with these guys. Will admit,
though, Thunders DID give ‘em their come-uppance
for the slander of “New York” on “London,”
the greatest rebuttal record ever, which just proves that
punks is as punx does. Which brings us to the eternal
question…if the Pistols are the greatest group ever,
who’s second? Answer: Minor Threat of course. Reason?
They only made two albums.

1.
Katy Lied—Steely Dan (ABC, 1975):
When considering such an arbitrary process as this one,
the prime consideration must always be perfection…that
is, an album made as a seamless entity where virtually
ALL the cuts stack up. And going through the 8 billion
albums in my archives, it’s apparent to me that
this one is perhaps the ALL TIME solid winner…sound-,
performance-, composition-wise, and of course conceptually.
The Dan’s best album, it caught them right in the
midst of their transition from a quirky post-hippie band
into a slick ersatz-jazz outfit. The subsequent Royal
Scam, distinctly harder-rocking, was no slouch either,
but Katy Lied is so impeccable there’s
really little reason to even OWN another album. This is
the great joke of Steely Dan—the first song, “Black
Friday,” is perhaps the worst cut. And how many
groups have ever done it that way? But these guys were
CANNY! Not that “Black Friday”’s bad
coz nary a cut on ANY Steely alb, from Can’t
Buy a Thrill to even the somewhat remedial Gaucho,
is bad (is Citizen the greatest boxed-set ever?).
But it’s STATIC in a way that suggests that here,
they were still trying to appeal to the moustache-ride
mentality (altho’ El Skunko’s guit-solo, while
wank, is GOOD wank). But from that point on they perfected
a kind of polished-but-cynical “laidback”
groove that’s never been matched. “Bad Sneakers”
is unabashed rich-guy’s rock, of the Tom Fourcade/Hunter
Thompson variety—the dead giveaway is the line “transistor
and a large sum of money to spend” (altho’
these guys had already hinted at it on “Show Biz
Kids” on the great second album, Countdown to
Ecstasy, another candidate for enshrinement). It
was the day and age of the capitalist hippie, the kind
of thing that led up to such phenomena as Saturday Night
Live and, admittedly, prompted the ire o’ the punks.
It wouldn’t work nowadays, because once again, after
the eighties, bein’ a freewheelin’ money grubber
meant bein’ a corporate raider-trader who towed
the line and followed the rules…whereas in the days
of Katy Lied it was purely a case of cultural
spillover (i.e., being in the RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT
TIME)…these guys got DAMN lucky to be hippies in
the day and age when it was LUCRATIVE to be a hippie and
when being a capitalist meant you spent the money on COKE
instead of on education for your kids, or SUVs or memberships
to health clubs etc. The Dan didn’t give a fuck
about anything—other than the quality of their music.
They were REAL punks, in the true sense. And the ire they
inspired in the punx was partly sour grapes…coz
these guys were getting away SCOTFREE w/ out havin’
to “pay their dues.” And to me, in the empirical
sense, that makes ‘em even superior to the Dictators.
Punk is a case of who gets away with more, and these guys
obviously got away with a LOT…like gettin slick
hotshots like Phil Woods n’ Tom Scott to guest here,
givin’ ‘em the preemptory jazz-rock vibe epitomized
by “Doctor Wu”: seldom has there ever been
such a flawless piece of music, summing up timeless yesterdays
as keyboards, horns and guitars all unfurl in cascading
waves that beat hell on any other such “fusion”
attempts from the same era. Similarly, check out the embryonic
musical tapestries that begin “Your Gold Teeth II”—time
signatures that totally put other ersatz-jazzers like
Zappa to shame. The Dan were pros, but they never used
it for jerk-off purposes. They were slick, but so is Hosier’s
vinyl catsuit. Slick isn’t always a bad thing. Slick
doesn’t always mean emotionless. The punks fostered
that theory…and missed the point once again. The
bridge of “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies”
is downright exuberant in a way that negates the theory
that these guys were solemn killjoys. And “Every
World That I’m Welcome To,” the alb’s
best song and one of the ten most moving musical performances
of the 20th century, is the all-time most compassionate
nihilistic song EVER. Trust me, that’s a LOT harder
to muster than even the most well-intentioned emotionally-compelling
case of the rants. The middle-eight—“I’ve
got this thing inside me/That’s gotta find a place
to hide me” etc.—is absolute proof of the
compassion that lurks within the—albeit cynical—heart
of the beast.